Tag Archives: James Burnham

Fordham History graduate student LaurenceJurdem has published “James Burnham, Sidney Hook and the Search for Intellectual Truth: From Communism to the Cold War, 1933-1956,” in the latest issue of American Communist History 13:2-3 (2014). The article, which originated as a paper in the US History seminar with Dr. Daniel Soyer, discusses the intellectual odyssey of the conservative foreign policy columnist James Burnham and the public intellectual Sidney Hook. Jurdem examines how the two academics were first fascinated and then disillusioned with the ideas of Karl Marx. That intellectual shift played a decisive role in causing the two men to spend the rest of their careers as advocates for the destruction of the Soviet Union. Jurdem is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “The Power to Define Reality: The Influence of Conservative Media on American Foreign Policy 1964-1984”.